Forging Oscar Wilde: Mrs. Chan-Toon and For Love of the King

... a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities....

—Oscar Wilde, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," 1889

In critical essays such as "Pen Pencil and Poison" and fictions such as "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." (1889), Oscar Wilde argued that forgery—which he enthusiastically endorsed—ought to be viewed as a creative, and not a criminal, act. The unnamed narrator of "Mr. W. H." insists, for instance, that "forgeries were merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation ... and that all Art being to a certain extent a mode of acting, an attempt to realize one's own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem." ¹

This promotion of forgery hinges on Wilde's enduring critique of Romantic theories of literary creativity that privilege originality. By this logic, Wilde regarded forgery as a practice akin to the making of art, which, like all imaginative fictions, necessarily involves "lying." In critical dialogues such as "The Decay of Lying" (1889) and "The Critic as Artist" (1890), he further redefines conventional understandings of the dialectic between originality and imitation, the real thing and the copy. In these texts, he insists that the "return to life and nature" sponsored by the Romantics is a form of copying precisely because it is an imitation of reality, whereas "self-conscious and deliberate" artifice, which draws from the palettes of art itself, constitutes the real thing, a superior form of aesthetic authenticity. ² Perfect artistic representation, for Wilde, is thus not a matter of imitating nature, but rather of imitating art.

Such aesthetic theories find close parallels in Wilde's own methods of writing. He was well known for practicing what he preached, insofar as he frequently resorted to artistic imitation, plagiarizing himself as well as other writers whom he admired. "Pen, Pencil and Poison," to take just one example, contains an unattributed line from Walter Pater's seminal treatise on aesthetic criticism, The Renaissance (1873). ³ The manuscript of Wilde's unpublished lecture on the eighteenth-century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton, to take another example, incorporates numerous pages he cut out of two biographies of Chatterton and then pasted into a notebook containing his alterations, amplifications, and corrections. In a discussion of this "purloined lecture," Paul K. Saint-Amour argues that literary forgery constitutes "the plagiarist's mirror-image crime. While he addressed the one [forgery], Wilde was both committing and theorizing the other [plagiarism]." ⁴ Ironically, Wilde proves the only theorist and committed practitioner of aesthetic imposture who posthumously became the subject—or the object—of what bibliographer Christopher Millard proclaimed a "SENSATIONAL ... LITERARY FORGERY." This essay explores the sensation in question: the forged play For Love of the King, which was published by one Mrs. Chan-Toon in 1921 under Wilde's name at the very historical moment of his recuperation by the literary establishment. This play, as we shall observe, had the merit of appearing to complete the Wilde canon and the potential to destabilize a project undertaken by Millard and Robert Ross, Wilde's literary executor, that sought to secure Wilde's status in English letters.

In publishing For Love of the King, Mrs. Chan-Toon not only put into practice Wilde's theories about forgery and other acts of literary imposture. She also created a material myth about him, for the published play is an artifact whose claims to authenticity illuminate the various coordinates of the cultural afterlife of "Oscar Wilde" in the early twentieth century. After his death in Paris in 1900, Wilde became the subject of legends that were the creation of diverse hands, with different and often competing agendas. ⁵ To audiences nostalgic for the Victorian era, he could be a period piece, an emblem of frivolous Victoriana; to modernists, he represented a defiant turn away from the nineteenth century's literary, social, and sexual constrictions; and still to others, Wilde became both the model and the martyr of a nascent homosexual identity...